The Bristol Post brought together some of the key figures in the ongoing transformation of the Temple Meads Enterprise Zone to discuss the future evolution of the area.

The round-table discussion, chaired by Bristol Post editor Mike Norton, saw contributions from Professor Guy Orpen, deputy vice chancellor at the University of Bristol, Professor Dave Cliff, academic director for the new University of Bristol Temple Quarter campus, James Durie, executive director of Business West, Matt Cross, head of inward investment at Invest in Bristol and Bath and Sue Ramsay, headteacher at Hannah More Primary School, which stands beside the enterprise zone.

Also taking part in the debate were Monika Radclyffe, centre director for the Bristol SETsquared Centre, Simon Peacock, lead director for the South and Wales region at JLL, Neil Bradshaw, programme manager for the Temple Quarter project at the University of Bristol, John Mitchell, regional business development and marketing manager at Skanska, serial tech entrepreneur Steve Allpress and Alistair Reid, service director for place and economy at Bristol City Council.

Here we publish an abridged transcript to give a snapshot of the discussion.

Mike Norton: “I’m sure many of you like me were at the launch for the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone in 2012, and even then it was obvious that the zone offered a once in a generation opportunity to turn around the fortunes of a swathe of the city that frankly was long overdue for regeneration. But with Temple Meads at its core, the zone is our gateway to the city. I think now, five years on, we’re starting to see the vision that was rolled out on that day. But it’s the University of Bristol’s plan for a new campus in the zone that is unveiled this week, that will bring a potentially game-changing injection of vibrancy and opportunity.”

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Alistair Reid: “More and more we’re conscious of the tale of two cities. We have deep seated deprivation in the south of Bristol and in pockets in the north. Our challenge is to take our economic activity and ensure it continues to flourish, but also to look at how the benefits of it are shared in a much wider sense. It’s not just developments at all costs at the moment – it’s not just trickle-down. Trickle-down won’t solve all our problems.”

The Bristol Post held a round table discussion looking at the evolution of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone

Professor Guy Orpen: “This is part of a bigger push within the University to re-imagine its role in the city, reframe its overall strategy. Central to that, as well as educating our students really well and giving them a wonderful time, and doing really ground-breaking, world-leading research, central to the whole proposition is our partnership with our city.That’s a key point of differentiation compared with our competitors, whether they be in London, or Oxford or Cambridge or Manchester or wherever they are. It’s our city, and the ambition and the new strategy is about celebrating and being proactive about that partnership in a way that perhaps we weren’t 10 or 20, or 30 or 50 years ago. We have been a fantastically successful university by many yardsticks, but we haven’t really tried to take advantage of the relationship we have with the city and the benefits it brings to us and the benefits we can bring to it.

“When it comes to the enterprise zone, we’re here already. We run the Engine Shed on behalf of the city and for the city, including for our own subsidiary, the SETSquared Centre. But the new campus will be game-changing for us. It gives us an opportunity to partner with the city in new ways, to be more focused on business and digital innovation and changing the way that we work with external partners, but also how we can create value for those external partners. Those partners will be many and varied. They will be the obvious ones – the Oracles, the Hewlett Packards, and the business services companies of this world, because we will create graduates that they need for the digital world that they are going into. Even Airbus and others that need different sorts of business models and capabilities, but it goes much wider than that and not simply into the creative sector, but into the rest of society. We all need to know, how does the digital world impact on us? How do we make it fair, accessible to all, provide appropriate regulatory models and appropriate legal frameworks and business models that can work in this new 21st century world that we have emerged very quickly into.

“So we would see ourselves to being central to that, then as an anchor and a civic institution, I expect that as we can go on site and take risks that other parties wouldn’t take because we know we’re going to be here – that’s one thing that’s never going to change, the University of Bristol will always be in the middle of Bristol. We are here for the long run. As a result, we will break ground in many places that others would have been very troubled about breaking ground, because it is a very difficult site. It may be a wonderful site, but it’s not easy.”

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Mike Norton: “Why the zone for the University? Why are you going into that area? What’s your vision for the campus going forward?”

Professor Guy Orpen: “There’s internal drivers. The Clifton campus is getting very full and we need to decompress for the benefit of people on that campus, but also in particular for our neighbours. But we will be investing a lot up there as well - to make it a more pleasant experience for the people on it and for the people going through it.

“We’ll carry some of that thinking into Temple Quarter, so it will be a campus for our students and staff and our direct partners who are co-located with us, including businesses, to enjoy and work on. But it will also be open to, and walked through, and enjoyed by and shared with our neighbours, particularly in the communities immediately surrounding. The public consultation is a really important part of it – what guidance can they give us about how we develop it so that it is, particularly at ground level, like a place where they want to be and they want to take part in.

“What we do there is intended to complement what we do in Clifton/Kingsdown campus now. There we will do subjects that it’s possible to sit in your office or lecture theatre or library, and have a big thought, study it and write about it.

“When we try to do things that require us to partner with the rest of the world, it makes more sense to do it closer to them and at the heart of it all, and Temple Quarter is a great venue for saying this is a new way of working for a 21st century research-intensive, civic university, and let’s work with the city to work out how that is best done. Let’s do things which we wouldn’t traditionally have done. Let’s have something which is more future-oriented, where the technology is inherently part of the business education you get.”

The Bristol Post held a round table discussion looking at the evolution of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone

Professor Dave Cliff: “The new campus will be focus on innovation, enterprise and engagement. We think that for any enterprise, whether it’s a social enterprise or a commercial enterprise, innovation is the lifeblood of sustaining business.

“My background is in artificial intelligence, and there are some really major shifts in the future of work and employment that we’re starting to see. They’re no longer suspicions, but they’re almost certainties. So the number of people employed to drive vehicles is likely to fall dramatically in the next decade or decade and a half and there are similar professions that traditionally required degree level education for that are likely to become very automated. So we see that there’s going to be increasing demand for people who wan to reskill in the course of their career. But the ability to innovate, to create, to think of new technologies that address business or societal needs, or to think of new business models that use creative combinations of technologies – that’s something that will not be automated any time soon.

“So what we want to do is have a focus down there on educating students to become innovators in multiple contexts not just digital technology.

“However there is a focus on digital technology down there because Bristol there are Cray, Toshiba, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, all with long traditions of being providers of IT services and equipment, but there are also big data-intensive companies that you wouldn’t have traditionally thought of as being IT-heavy, but are now extremely reliant on digital technologies. Airbus and Boeing. The whole world of finance is going very fintech, very data-heavy.

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“We could be boring and do what we have done successfully at the top of Park Street for over 100 years and transplant that down to Temple Quarter, but that’s not really the style of our organisation. We’re treating this as an opportunity to totally rethink what it is to be a university.

“We want the ground floor buildings in the academic departments to be available to community use. If we’re building a big lecture theatre for 200-500 people, why not build it as a theatre, or at least as something that can be reconfigured, potentially as a performance space. We could have meeting rooms that are available for community use. We could have exhibition spaces there. Obviously we also have to remain a business as a university, so these would be multi-purpose spaces rather than dedicated spaces.”

Mike Norton: “Engine Shed, of course, has been a huge success. How do you manage that success going forward?

Monika Radclyffe: “It is challenging. We have 77 companies in right now. That’s 30 more than the same time last year. There is demand to bring even more. We reject 75 per cent of applications we have. So we clearly pick the best of the best.

“We do not just focus on academic spin-outs. We are open for everyone to join us and the companies within SETSquared benefit from the diversity of people in that network. The challenge for us is that long waiting list of companies to join us.

“Those 77 companies created 1,250 jobs. So if we were able to expand in the future, we would need a much location to do that. We are working out how we fit into the new campus.”

Matt Cross: “The Engine Shed has been an enormous benefit to us over the years, just by those incidental meetings. You bump into someone and you suddenly find that the global president of a company is in town next week. That wouldn’t happen anywhere else.”

Alistair Reid: “Traditionally business incubation space has been subsidised in one form or another, as has Engine Shed and Engine Shed 2. There are growths of start-ups based outside the public sector subsidies - in terms of Entrepreneurial Spark and Unit DX. We shouldn’t forget, with the squeeze on the public purse, that good things will need to work themselves.”

Steve Allpress: “For me, it was an extremely challenging. The problem we found was that although we started the company in Aztec West, we moved to the centre of town but found it extremely hard to find space that wasn’t prohibitively expensive. The landlords tended to pocket the advantage of zero business rates for themselves. From our perspective, you might like to see the enterprise zone working in wider areas, like Stokes Croft.”

The Bristol Post held a round table discussion looking at the evolution of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone

Simon Peacock: “Growth is a good problem to have. You create this massively successful incubator, then the pipeline stumbles – where is the space to go on into? The chink of light might be Glassfields.”

James Durie: “St Philip’s is a natural place over the next 10 or 20 years where the city will grow, and as a city we need to think about that.”

Mike Norton: Sue, how does your school fit into this? How do you feel about the zone?

Sue Ramsay: “Mostly I’m excited about it. The school can be a fantastic place for people to talk to the community. Our community are very engaged with the school.

“When you walk over that bridge and you go past the lovely Friska and you get to Avon Street, it is quite a stark decline in the state of the place and I worry that Avon Street becomes a wall rather than just a road and the people from the community I serve and Barton Hill and Easton don’t ever go there. There needs to be some thinking in how are the communities engaged in those spaces.”

Mike Norton: “What about the arena - where are we up to with that? What if it doesn’t get built?”

Professor Guy Orpen: “The design of what we’re doing is implicitly tied up with the fact that there is an arena on the other side of the island. If for some reason there is no arena on the other side of the island, our design would need to be different and would look frankly silly if it’s constructed with one neighbourhood in mind and we discover we have a completely different one.”

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Alistair Reid: “So on the arena, we lost time with our previous contractor and had to go through a second tender. We are now at a pre-contract service agreement with Buckingham. So week by week we move through a 20-week phase where Buckingham will familiarise themselves with the design, they will challenge the design from a build ability and a cost perspective. They will then put out the key packages to their sub-contractors and at the end of the 20 weeks will come back to tell us how much they think the building will cost. That is the rub. Then there will be a report to the city council’s cabinet that will look at value for money.

“The mayor has also made it clear that he wants us to look again at car parking.

“We’re three weeks into the 20 week period. There’s an opportunity for an additional 10 weeks – because we have got to get this right. So I anticipate at the turn of the year it will come back to cabinet.

“I think this is a hugely difficult and challenging project and it has been all along. But we are working with a contractor that we feel can deliver for us.”